Robinetta

“What is it, darling?” she asked. “Oh, it’s the bright rose!” Then she hurriedly unfastened the flower from her waist-belt and turned to Lavendar. “Will you please take your penknife and scrape away all the little thorns,” she asked.

“The rose looked very charming where it was,” he remarked, half regretfully, as he did what she commanded.

“It will look better still, presently,” she answered.

The child’s hands were outstretched longingly to grasp the flower, its eyes, unnaturally deep and wise with pain, were fixed upon Robinette’s face. She bent over the chair, and her voice was like a dove’s voice, Lavendar thought, as she spoke. Then the little melancholy carriage was wheeled away. Motherhood always seemed the most sacred, the supreme experience to Robinette; a thing high and beautiful like the topmost blooms of Nurse Prettyman’s plum tree. “If one had to choose between that sturdy boy and this wistful wraith, it would be hard,” she thought. “All my pride would run out to the boy, but I could die for love and pity if this suffering baby were mine!”

Lavendar had turned, and leaned on the wall with averted face. “Sweet woman!” he was saying to himself. “It is more than a merry heart that is able to give such sympathy; it’s a sad old world after all where such things can be; but a woman like that can bring good out of evil.”

Robinette had seated herself on a low wall beside him. Her little embroidered futility of a handkerchief was in her hand once more. “A rose and a smile! that’s all we could give it,” she said; “and we would either of us share some of that burden if we only could.” She watched the merry, healthy children playing beside them, and added, “After all let us comfort ourselves that brown cheeks and fat legs are in the majority. Rightness somehow or other must be at the root of things, or we shouldn’t be a living world at all.”

“Amen,” said Lavendar, “but the sight of suffering innocents like that, sometimes makes me wish I were dead.”

“Dead!” she echoed. “Why, it makes me wish for a hundred lives, a hundred hearts and hands to feel with and help with.”

“Ah, some women are made that way. My stepmother, the only mother I’ve known, was like that,” Lavendar went on, dropping suddenly again into personal talk, as they had done before. He and she, it seemed, could not keep barriers between them very long; every hour they spent together brought them more strangely into knowledge of each other’s past.

“She was a fine woman,” he went on, “with a certain comfortable breadth about her, of mind and body; and those large, warm, capable hands that seem so fitted to lift burdens.”

Lavendar was in an absent-minded mood, and never much given to noting details at any time. He bent over on the low wall in retrospective silence, looking at the blue sea before them.

Robinette, who was perched beside him, spread her two small hands on her white serge knees and regarded them fixedly for a moment.

“I wonder if it’s a matter of size,” she said after a moment. “I wonder! Let’s be confidential. When I was a little girl we were not at all well-to-do, and my hands were very busy. My father’s success came to him only two or three years before his death, when his reputation began to grow and his plans for great public buildings began to be accepted, so I was my mother’s helper. We had but one servant, and I learned to make beds, to dust, to wipe dishes, to make tea and coffee, and to cook simple dishes. If Admiral de Tracy’s sister had to work, Admiral de Tracy’s niece was certainly going to help! Later on came my father’s illness and death. We had plenty of servants then, but my hands had learned to be busy. I gave him his medicines, I changed his pillows, I opened his letters and answered such of them as were within my powers, I fanned him, I stroked his aching head. The end came, and mother and I had hardly begun to take hold of life again when her health failed. I wasn’t enough for her; she needed father and her face was bent towards him. My hands were busy again for months, and they held my mother’s when she died. Time went on. Then I began again to make a home out of a house; to use my strength and time as a good wife should, for the comfort of her husband; but oh! so faultily, for I was all too young and inexperienced. It was only for a few months, then death came into my life for the third time, and I was less than twenty. For the first time since I can remember, my hands are idle, but it will not be for long. I want them to be busy always. I want them to be full! I want them to be tired! I want them ready to do the tasks my head and heart suggest.”

Lavendar had a strong desire to take those same hands in his and kiss them, but instead he rose and spread out his own long brown fingers on the edge of the wall, a man’s hands, fine and supple, but meant to work.

“I seem to have done nothing,” he exclaimed. “You look so young, so irresponsible, so like a bird on a bough, that I cannot associate dull care with you, yet you have lived more deeply than I. Life seems to have touched me on the shoulder and passed me by; these hands of mine have never done a real day’s work, Mrs. Loring, for they’ve been the servants of an unwilling brain. I hated my own work as a younger man, and, though I hope I did not shirk it, I certainly did nothing that I could avoid.” He paused, and went on slowly, “I’ve thought sometimes, of late I mean, that if life is to be worth much, if it is to be real life, and not mere existence, one must put one’s whole heart into it, and that two people–” He stopped; he was silent with embarrassment, conscious of having said too much.

“Can help each other. Indeed they can,” Mrs. Loring went on serenely, “if they have the same ideals. Hardly anyone, fortunately, is so alone as I, and so I have to help myself! Your sisters, now; don’t they help?”

“Not a great deal,” Lavendar confessed. “One would, but she’s married and in India, worse luck! The other is–well, she’s a candid sister.” He laughed, and looked up. “If my best friend could hear my sister Amy’s view of me, just have a little sketch of me by Amy without fear or favour, he, or she, would never have a very high opinion of me again, and I am not sure but that I should agree with her.”

“Nonsense! my dear friend,” exclaimed Robinette in a maternal tone she sometimes affected,–a tone fairly agonizing to Mark Lavendar; “we should never belittle the stuff that’s been put into us! My equipment isn’t particularly large, but I am going to squeeze every ounce of power from it before I die.”

“Life is extraordinarily interesting to you, isn’t it?”

“Interesting? It is thrilling! So will it be to you when you make up your mind to squeeze it,” said Robinette, jumping off the wall. “There is Carnaby signalling; it is time we went to the station.”

“Life would thrill me considerably more if Carnaby were not eternally in evidence,” said Lavendar, but Robinette pretended not to hear.

XII

LOVE IN THE MUD

The next day Robinette was once more sitting in the boat opposite to Lavendar as he rowed. They were going down the river this time, not across it. Somehow they had managed that afternoon to get out by themselves, which sounds very simple, but is a wonderfully difficult thing to accomplish when there is no special reason for it, and when there are several other people in the house.

Fortunately Mrs. de Tracy did not like to be alone, so that wherever she went Miss Smeardon had to go too, and there happened to be a sale of work at a neighbouring vicarage that afternoon where she considered her presence a necessity. Robinette had vanished soon after luncheon and the middy had been dull, so after loitering around for a while, he too had disappeared upon some errand of his own. Lavendar walked very slowly toward the avenue gateway, then he turned and came back. He could scarcely believe his good fortune when he saw Mrs. Loring come out of the house, and pause at the door as if uncertain of her next movements. She looked uncommonly lovely in a white frock with touches of blue, while the ribbon in her hair brought out all its gold. She wore a flowery garden hat, and a pair of dainty most un-English shoes peeped from beneath her short skirt.

“Are you going out, or can I take you on the river?” Lavendar asked, trying without much success to conceal the eagerness that showed in his voice and eyes.

Robinette stood for a moment looking at him (it seemed as if she read him like a book) and then she said frankly, “Why yes, there is nothing I should like so much, but where is Carnaby?”

“Hang Carnaby! I mean I don’t know, or care. I’ve had too much of his society to-day to be pining for it now.”

“Well, he does chatter like a magpie, but I feel he must have such a dull time here with no one anywhere near his own age. Elderly as I am, I seem a bit nearer than Aunt de Tracy or Miss Smeardon. Aunt de Tracy, all the same, will never understand my relations with that boy, or with anyone else for that matter. I did try so hard,” she went on, “when I first arrived, just to strike the right note with her, and I’ve missed it all the time, by that very fact, no doubt. I’m so unused to trying–at home.”

“You mean in America?”

“Yes, of course; I don’t try there at all, and yet my friends seem to understand me.”

“Does it seem to you that you could ever call England ‘home’?”

“I could not have believed that England would so sink into my heart,” she said, sitting down in the doorway and arranging the flowers on her hat. “During those first dull wet days when I was still a stranger, and when I looked out all the time at the dripping cedars, and felt whenever I opened my lips that I said the wrong thing, it seemed to me I should never be gay for an hour in this country; but the last enchanting sunny days have changed all that. I remember it’s my mother’s country, and if only I could have found a little affection waiting for me, all would have been perfect.”

“You may find it yet.” Lavendar could not for the life of him help saying the words, but there was nothing in the tone in which he said them to make Robinette conscious of his meaning.

“I’m afraid not,” she sighed, thinking of Mrs. de Tracy’s indifference. “I’m much more American than English, much more my father’s daughter than the Admiral’s niece; perhaps my aunt feels that instinctively. Now I must slip upstairs and change if we are going boating.”

“Never!” cried Lavendar. “If I don’t snatch you this moment from the devouring crowd I shall lose you! I will keep you safe and dry, never fear, and we shall be back well before dark.”

They went down the river after leaving the little pier, passing the orchards heaped on the hillsides above Wittisham, and Lavendar wanted to row out to sea, but Robinette preferred the river; so he rowed nearer to the shore, where the current was less swift, and the boat rocked and drifted with scarcely a touch of the oars. They had talked for some time, and then a silence had fallen, which Robinette broke by saying, “I half wish you’d forsake the law and follow lines of lesser resistance, Mr. Lavendar. Do you know, you seem to me to be drifting, not rowing! I’ve been thinking ever since of what you said to me on the sands at Weston.”

“Ungrateful woman!” he exclaimed, trying to evade the subject, “when these two faithful arms have been at your service every day since we first met! Think of the pennies you would have taken from that tiny gold purse of yours for the public ferry! However, I know what you mean; I never met anyone so plain-spoken as you, Mrs. Robin; I haven’t forgotten, I assure you!”

“How about the candid sister? Isn’t she plain-spoken?”

“Oh, she attacks the outside of the cup and platter; you question motive power and ideals. Well, I confess I have less of the former than I ought, and more of the latter than I’ve ever used.” Lavendar had rested on his oars now and was looking down, so that the twinkle of his eyes was lost. “I suppose I shall go on as I have done hitherto, doing my work in a sort of a way, and getting a certain amount of pleasure out of things,–unless–”

“Oh, but that’s not living!” she exclaimed; “that’s only existing. Don’t you remember:–

It is not growing like a treeIn bulk doth make man better be.

It’s really living I mean, forgetting the things that are behind, and going on and on to something ahead, whatever one’s aim may be.”

“What are you going to do with yourself, if I may ask?” said Lavendar. “Don’t be too philanthropic, will you? You’re so delightfully symmetrical now!”

“I shall have plenty to do,” cried Robinette ardently. “I’ve told you before, I have so much motive power that I don’t know how to use it.”

“How about sharing a little of it with a friend!”

Lavendar’s voice was full of meaning, but Robinette refused to hear it. She had succumbed as quickly to his charm as he to hers, but while she still had command over her heart she did not intend parting with it unless she could give it wholly. She knew enough of her own nature to recognize that she longed for a rowing, not a drifting mate, and that nothing else would content her; but her instinct urged that Lavendar’s indecisions and his uncertainties of aim were accidents rather than temperamental weaknesses. She suspected that his introspective moods and his occasional lack of spirits had a definite cause unknown to her.

“I haven’t a large income,” she said, after a moment’s silence, changing the subject arbitrarily, and thereby reducing her companion to a temporary state of silent rage.

“Yet no one would expect a woman like this to fall like a ripe plum into a man’s mouth,” he thought presently; “she will drop only when she has quite made up her mind, and the bough will need a good deal of shaking!”

“I haven’t a large income,” repeated Robinette, while Lavendar was silent, “only five thousand dollars a year, which is of course microscopic from the American standpoint and cost of living; so I can’t build free libraries and swimming baths and playgrounds, or do any big splendid things; but I can do dear little nice ones, left undone by city governments and by the millionaires. I can sing, and read, and study; I can travel; and there are always people needing something wherever you are, if you have eyes to see them; one needn’t live a useless life even if one hasn’t any responsibilities. But”–she paused–“I’ve been talking all this time about my own plans and ambitions, and I began by asking yours! Isn’t it strange that the moment one feels conscious of friendship, one begins to want to know things?”

“My sister Amy would tell you I had no ambitions, except to buy as many books as I wish, and not to have to work too hard,” said Mark smiling, “but I think that would not be quite true. I have some, of a dull inferior kind, not beautiful ones like yours.”

“Do tell me what they are.”

He shook his head. “I couldn’t; they’re not for show; shabby things like unsuccessful poor relations, who would rather not have too much notice taken of them. In a few weeks I am going to drag them out of their retreat, brighten them up, inject some poetry into their veins, and then display them to your critical judgment.”

They were almost at a standstill now and neither of them was noticing it at all. As Mrs. Loring moved her seat the boat lurched somewhat to one side. Mark, to steady her, placed his hand over hers as it rested on the rail, and she did not withdraw it. Then he found the other hand that lay upon her knee, and took it in his own, scarcely knowing what he did. He looked into her face and found no anger there. “I wish to tell you more about myself,” he stammered, “something not altogether creditable to me; but perhaps you will understand. Perhaps even if you don’t understand you will forgive.”

She drew her hands gently away from his grasp. “I shall try to understand, you may rely on that!” she said.

“I’m not going to trouble you with any very dreadful confessions,” he said, “only it’s better to hear things directly from the people concerned, and you are sure to hear a wrong version sooner or later.”–Then stopping suddenly he exclaimed, “Hullo! we’re stuck, I declare! look at that!”

Robinette turned and saw that their boat was now scarcely surrounded with water at all. On every side, as if the flanks of some great whale were upheaving from below, there appeared stretches of glistening mud. Just in front of them, where there still was a channel of water, was an upstanding rock. “Shall we row quickly there?” she cried. “Then perhaps we can get out and pull the boat to the other side, where there is more water. What has happened?”

“Oh, something not unusual,” said Lavendar grimly, “that I’m a fool, and the sea-tide has ebbed, as tides have been known to do before. I’m afraid a man doesn’t watch tides when he has a companion like you! Now we’re left high, but not at all dry, as you see, till the tide turns.”

By a swift stroke or two he managed to propel their craft as far as the rock. They scrambled up on it, and then he tried to haul the boat around the miniature islet; but the more he hauled, the quicker the water seemed to run away, and the deeper the wretched thing stuck in the mud. He jumped in again, and made an effort to push her off with an oar; meanwhile Robinette nearly fell off the rock in her efforts to get the head of the boat around towards the current again, and making a frantic plunge into the ooze, sank above her ankles in an instant. Lavendar caught hold of her and helped her to scramble back into the boat. “It’s all right; only my skirt wet, and one shoe gone!” she panted. “Now, what are we to do?” She spread out her hands in dismay, and looked down at her draggled mud-stained skirt, her little feet, one shoeless and both covered with mud and slime. “What an object I shall be to meet Aunt de Tracy’s eye, when, if ever, it does light on me again! Meanwhile it seems as if we might be here for some hours. The boat is just settling herself into the mud bank, like a rather tired fat old woman into an armchair, and pray, Mr. Lavendar, what do you propose to do? as Talleyrand said to the lady who told him she couldn’t bear it.”

Lavendar looked about them; the main bed of the river was fifty yards away; between it and them was now only an expanse of mud.

“It’s perfectly hopeless,” he said, “the best thing we can do is to beget some philosophy.”

“Which at any moment we would exchange for a foot of water,” she interpolated.

“We must just sit here and wait for the tide. Shall it be in the boat or on the rock?”

“I don’t see much difference, do you? Except that the passing boats, if there are any, might think it was a matter of choice to sit on a damp rock for two hours, but no one could think we wanted to sit in a boat in the mud.”

They landed on the rock for the second time. “For my part it’s no great punishment,” said Lavendar, when they settled themselves, “since the place is big enough for two and you’re one of them!”

“Wouldn’t this be as good a stool of repentance from which to confess your faults as any?” asked Robinette, as she tucked her shoeless foot beneath her mud-stained skirt and made herself as comfortable as possible. “I’ll even offer a return of confidence upon my own weaknesses, if I can find them, but at present only miles of virtue stretch behind me. Ugh! How the mud smells; quite penitential! Now:–

“What have you sought you should have shunned,And into what new follies run?”

“Oh, what a bad rhyme!” said Lavendar.

“It’s Pythagoras, any way,” she explained.

Then suddenly changing his tone, Lavendar went on. “This is not merely a jest, Mrs. Loring. Before you admit me really amongst the number of your friends I should like you to know that–to put it plainly–my own little world would tell you at the moment that I am a heartless jilt.”

“That is a very ugly expression, Mr. Lavendar, and I shall choose not to believe it, until you give me your own version of the story.”

“In one way I can give you no other; except that I was just fool enough to drift into an engagement with a woman whom I did not really love, and just not enough of a fool to make both of us miserable for life when I, all too late, found out my mistake.”

There passed before him at that moment other foolish blithe little loves, like faded flowers with the sweetness gone out of them. They had been so innocent, so fragile, so free from blame; all but the last; and this last it was that threatened to rise like a shadow perhaps, and defeat his winning the only woman he could ever love.

Robinette stared at the stretches of ooze, and then stole a look at Mark Lavendar. “The idea of calling that man a jilt,” she thought. “Look at his eyes; look at his mouth; listen to his voice; there is truth in them all. Oh for a sight of the girl he jilted! How much it would explain! No, not altogether, because the careless making of his engagement would have to be accounted for, as well as the breaking of it. Unless he did it merely to oblige her–and men are such idiots sometimes,–then he must have fancied he was in love with her. Perhaps he is continually troubled with those fancies. Nonsense! you believe in him, and you know you do.” Then aloud she said, sympathetically, “I’m afraid we are apt to make these little experimental journeys in youth, when the heart is full of wanderlust. We start out on them so lightly, then they lead nowhere, and the walking back alone is wearisome and depressing.”

“My return journey was depressing enough at first,” said Lavendar, “because the particular She was unkinder to me than I deserved even; but better counsels have prevailed and I shall soon be able to meet the reproachful gaze of stout matrons and sour spinsters more easily than I have for a year past; you see the two families were friends and each family had a large and interested connection!”

“If the opinion of a comparative stranger is of any use to you,” said Robinette, standing on the rock and scraping her stockinged foot free of mud, “I believe in you, personally! You don’t seem a bit ‘jilty’ to me! I’d let you marry my sister to-morrow and no questions asked!”

“I didn’t know you had a sister,” cried Lavendar.

“I haven’t; that’s only a figure of speech; just a phrase to show my confidence.”

“And isn’t it ungrateful to be obliged to say I can’t marry your sister, after you have given me permission to ask her!”

“Not only ungrateful but unreasonable,” said Robinette saucily, turning her head to look up the river and discovering from her point of vantage a moving object around the curve that led her to make hazardous remarks, knowing rescue was not far away. “What have you against my sister, pray?”

“Very little!” he said daringly, knowing well that she held him in her hand, and could make him dumb or let him speak at any moment she desired. “Almost nothing! only that she is not offering me her sister as a balm to my woes.”

“She has no sister; she is an only child!–There! there!” cried Robinette, “the tide is coming up again, and the mud banks off in that direction are all covered with water! I see somebody in a boat, rowing towards us with superhuman energy. Oh! if I hadn’t worn a white dress! It will not come smooth; and my lovely French hat is ruined by the dampness! My one shoe shows how inappropriately I was shod, and whoever is coming will say it is because I am an American. He will never know you wouldn’t let me go upstairs and dress properly.”

“It doesn’t matter anyway,” rejoined Mark, “because it is only Carnaby coming. You might know he would find us even if we were at the bottom of the river.”

XIII

CARNABY TO THE RESCUE

At Stoke Revel, in the meantime, the solemn rites of dinner had been inaugurated as usual by the sounding of the gong at seven o’clock. Mrs. de Tracy, Miss Smeardon, and Bates waited five minutes in silent resignation, then Carnaby came down and was scolded for being late, but there was no Robinette and no Lavendar.

“Carnaby,” said his grandmother, “do you know where Mark intended going this afternoon?”

“No, I don’t,” said Carnaby, sulkily.

“Your cousin Robinetta,”–with meaning,–“perhaps you know her whereabouts?”

“Not I!” replied Carnaby with affected nonchalance. “I was ferreting with Wilson.” He had ferreted perhaps for fifteen minutes and then spent the rest of the afternoon in solitary discontent, but he would not have owned it for the world.

“Call Bates,” commanded Mrs. de Tracy. Bates entered. “Do you know if Mr. Lavendar intended going any distance to-day? Did he leave any message?”